Howard Chandler Christy

Howard Chandler Christy was born in Ohio in 1873. He studied in New York at the National Academy of Design and at the Art Students League. He worked as an illustrator for Scribner's Magazine and during the Spanish American War he accompanied the United States Army to Cuba.

During the First World War Christy produced several notable posters including Gee! I Wish I Were A Man and The Spirit of America.

After the war Christy concentrated on portrait painting. He also painted the mural, The Signing of the Constitution in the Rotunda in Washington. Howard Chandler Christy died in 1952.

Apopular artist and illustrator, Howard Chandler Christy, created very different posters during World War I. In the decades before the war he had become known for his illustrations of the ''Christy Girl'' in magazines like Scribners and Cosmopolitan as well as numerous books. His posters mixed eroticism with patriotism to encourage army recruitment and support for the Liberty Loan campaigns.

Howard Christy Chandler's America's All includes a list of names chosen, no doubt, for their diversity; the names are stereotypically French, Polish, Greek, Jewish, Irish, etc. And his Liberty is an ideal beauty, as opposed to the marble-faced ladies of silver coins and the harbor. The appeal of sex in advertising gained impetus through war posters like this and another Christy poster, Fight or Buy Bonds, displaying another Lady Liberty wrapped in a flag and leading troops. In 1918, the very idea of wrapping a beautiful woman in the American flag carried some rather sensational implications.